Systematic Theology – The State

Freedom and the State

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 31

Dictation Name: 31 Freedom and the State

Year: 1970’s

Our third subject this evening is Freedom and the State.

Not only is morality transferred from God and his law to the state, but freedom is also transferred to the state. Whether the civil government be Marxist or Democratic, the state today speaks of freedom as an attribute of the state rather than of the people as individuals. Granted, there are very real differences between the freedom a man has in the United States and the freedom a man has in the Soviet Union, but the simple fact is that the attitude of the courts increasingly is that whatever freedom we have in this country is a matter of federal grant, a federal option, that the courts and Congress can limited that freedom as well as extend it, and of course, what they normally do is to limit it.

Now, there is a dramatic difference between what we enjoy and what the Marxist subject enjoys, but the principle is the same. In both countries, it is assumed to be the privilege of the state to say what freedom the individual can have, and that’s a very dangerous principle.

Let us turn once against to Gumplowicz, in whom we find a very frank statement of the fact that man, as a creature of the state, cannot be free. According to Gumplowicz, “That man is a free being is pure imagination. The premises of inalienable rights rest upon the most unreasonable self-deification of man, an overestimation of the value of human life, and upon a complete misconception of the only possible basis of the existence of the state. This fancied freedom and equality is incompatible with the state, and is a complete negation of it.” Of course, you can go to a book written in the last decade by Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and the title tells you his thesis.

Now, in biblical theology, the absolute freedom of God is a basic premise. God cannot be controlled by anything outside of himself, but this is the premise of humanistic doctrines of the state, the absolute freedom of the state.

Moreover, the state at the same time claims radical and final coercive powers over man. In the United States, as elsewhere, it is only the self-limitation of the state that restrains the state from acting as a total tyrant over us, but acts of Congress or acts of Parliament can alter or remove those limits. Without the doctrine of God and the covenant of God, no state will be restrained from playing the tyrant, and what we see today is the steady growth of power in Washington, as in Moscow, as in London and Berlin, and everywhere else. Every president who has been elected to the presidency in this country has promised to limit the powers of the federal government, and has extended them. After all, the major campaign promise of Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was that he was going to cut government spending and eliminate most of the bureaucracy, and we’ve seen nothing in the way of bureaucracy to equal the growth since then.

We’re going to look now as we deal with freedom and the state with Mexico, and for a very good reason. Most of us, as we think of Mexico, think of a backward and relatively primitive country. We do that because we look at it economically, but the simple fact is that in many respects, Mexico is far in advance of us. Now, that may come as a shock, but if you view things philosophically, humanistically, and say, “What country has applied the logic of humanism more consistently,” you would have to say, Mexico, precisely because Mexico has had a large population of simply and uneducated people, plus an intellectual elite who has all the theory that the intellectuals of this country have, and the ability to apply them. Mexico is a generation ahead of us.

Now, of course, we as Christians would say that’s a generation ahead of us and the road to ruin, but the fact is in terms of the premises in terms of which we are operating in Washington, Mexico is ahead of us. It has applied the same ideas much more systematically, much more logically, and therefore, it is further on the road to ruin, because the road to humanism is the road to ruin. The belief of these humanists is in a final order created by man, the great community of man.

Moreover, religion has no place in that final order, and religion cannot be allowed (Christianity is what they mean by religion), to influence the social order. As Gabino Barreda, a Mexican positivist thinker has said, “An individual should think and believe as he pleases, provided that his thoughts and beliefs do not alter the social order. The mission of public education was not merely to teach. It was to make public order possible.” In other words, you’re free to believe what you want as long as your religion is kept between your two ears. You cannot allow it to influence morality or the social order, and what kind of religion is that? Well, the kind of religion that is in most churches, unfortunately, and the kind of religion that these humanists are ready to tolerate, because it does not extend beyond the two ears of anyone. This is the view of many of these state and federal agencies that we battle in the course. Freedom is tenable for them, provided you don’t do anything to influence the social order. These humanists, and positivists also, define freedom as the ability to follow one’s natural course with no obstacles, like a river coming down a mountainside, being free to go as it pleases, not being obstructed.

Now, this is the definition of freedom in humanism. Well, consider how anti-Christian it is, because Christianity says, “Your natural impulses are fallen. You cannot follow them.” The Ten Commandments say, Thou shalt not do certain things because God forbids them. You cannot follow your nature impulse in these matters.

Well, for these humanists, Christianity is anti-freedom. Now do you begin to see why they are so hostile? Christianity is a hostile force to freedom. It’s fascism. Why? Because it restricts the natural impulses of man, hence, the sexual revolution. Hence, the drug culture. Let everyone follow their natural impulse, that’s freedom. Let everyone have pot. Let everyone do as they please. Let’s legalize every kind of perversion, which we are in process of doing, and the end result is that freedom is defined in terms that make Christianity anti-freedom, and therefore, there can be no freedom from their perspective without the destruction of Christianity. You see, when we talk about freedom, we mean freedom under God. We mean something radically different from the humanist, who says freedom is the freedom to follow the natural course of all things.

They limit it, at one point only, and to a decreasing degree, provided it does not hurt someone else, which means you can do almost anything except kill.

If we are God’s creatures, then our freedom is only under God and according to his law, but if man is an evolving being, determined by naturalistic drives and forces, then Christianity is a dramatic restraint on freedom. Thus, if you subscribe to the doctrine of evolution, you’re going to believe that Christianity is an anti-freedom force.

Moreover, this freedom cannot be contrary to the greatest natural force, the state. The state is the epitome of nature, the most advanced for in nature, and hence, as Barreda said, man is not free to do as he pleases, “Freedom ought to be subordinate to the interests of society. Namely, to the interest of the Mexican nation.” And he went on to say that laissez faire freedom is disorder, not liberty. He didn’t even feel it was worth discussing the Christian idea of freedom, that was so preposterous, and he said, “The state should intervene as an instrument of society in the moral education of Mexicans. It must prepare Mexicans to be good civil servants by stimulating their altruistic sentiments. The rights of society are more important than the rights of man.”

This is why Barreda believed that a civil dictatorship is often necessary to promote freedom. Why? Because sometimes you need a civil dictatorship to fight against the anti-freedom forces of Christianity. You see what this means? You equate reason with the state. You say religion and morality is what the state does, and the result is a Phariseeism, self-righteousness. The state can do no wrong, and the state is now the great good, which passes judgment on all other segments of society. The state is the necessary order of life, and to dissent from the state is then evil, because you’re waging war against the true God walking on earth, against the source of morality, against the source of freedom. You’re fighting against freedom, and therefore, you ought to be put into a slave labor camp, or into jail.

The end result is that not crime, but non-conformity becomes the great evil in the eyes of the state, and so we see increasingly more zeal expended by state governments in fighting Christian school teachers and ministers than in dealing with criminals, and you have to know the kind of money they spend in these cases, and the zeal and the lawyers they put on those cases, as against what they do with a criminal case, to appreciate that fact. In the Soviet Union, it is not the criminals who are the great criminals. It’s the dissenters, and all the accounts beginning with Solzhenitsyn, stress the fact that in the slave labor camps, the administration works with the criminals against the political prisoners, the dissenters, and we see in this country, crime untreated, and many cities, restricted freedom to move after dark, with the churches persecuted.

In the Middle Ages, Roman law was revived by the Empire in order to fight the church, because Roman law had this thesis which is now a part of our law, that there is only one power in society and it is the state. No other power like the church, no power beyond the state like God, only one power, the state. This is why Bucel{?} said that by 1453, the medieval world was dead and statism in the saddle, and you had the beginnings of the renaissance of humanism and the savagery of the modern age, and the dream of one world order.

Last month, I dealt with the emperor Sigismund, and how, although he is so exalted by historians as a great and noble character, was the one who gave Hus a safe conduct to the Council of Constance, and then acted as his prosecutor to have him burned at the stake, and how he was a deadbeat who, after several years of meeting of a vast congress, in Constance, went off and never paid his bill. Well, Maximilian, a later emperor, has often been called the foremost knight of his age. His dates were 1459-1519, and yet, this the foremost knight of his age was not only a man who dreamed of being the lord of all Europe, and he was as emperor ruling over a vast portion of it, but he also dreamed of deposing Pope Julian II and becoming himself the pope. He also spoke longingly of the treasure of the church and the great good he could accomplish if he could be both pope and emperor, and have all the tithes and the power of church funds. What Maximilian dreamed about, Henry VIII did, and Louis XIV, and Philip II, and other monarchs, Protestant and Catholic.

The state made itself into church and savior, and today, the ideas that were then propounded and have since been developed by the humanists, have triumphed. Freedom means today, to most people freedom to follow one’s natural course. Ask almost any child in the public schools, and they will define freedom accordingly, and this is why the drug culture and the sexual revolution flourishes, but our faith is ruled anti-freedom. Communion with nature now replaces communion with God as the source of inspiration, and freedom now means to do your own thing. It means submission to the forces of history, and to the drives of your own being. It means the death of freedom, because freedom is an anti-naturalistic force.

True freedom begins when we say, “No,” to certain things in us, and things around us, and we assert our strength above and over, and beyond them, and there is no freedom possible unless we see freedom as an anti-naturalistic thing. There’s only one faith that sees freedom in those terms. It’s biblical faith. It is Christianity, and this is why only in the context of a Christian culture has freedom ever been known in this world, true freedom, because only Christianity says it’s not following the course of nature. It’s not expressing all your physical urges, and indulging them. It is an anti-naturalistic force. It is the power of God governing us to do the will of God in whom is our perfect freedom.

Are there any questions now?

[Audience] No, question. Just an observation I thought might be kind of interesting. Gwen was telling me today that there’s an underground fad happening on the college campuses {?} America {?}. Virginity is coming back.

[Rushdoony] Yes. A part of it is fear, fear of the consequences of the sexual revolution. You know, they’re trying to underrate the effect of herpes, and just recently, someone died of herpes. So, they’re downplaying that, and they’re very proud of themselves because they’ve downplayed it, because the whole thing is so exaggerated, you know. But, virginity must come from faith or it doesn’t add up to much. Yes?

[Audience] In response to that, by the way, my wife tells me that there are millions of babies who died from herpes, whether or not the parents, {?}

[Rushdoony] That not a publicized fact, a very interesting one. I hope you all heard that, that babies are dying of herpes.

[Audience] Another interesting thing on that. Time magazine had quite a well-publicized article some time ago on herpes. It was a pretty good article, you know, fairly objective. The interesting thing was the following issue that came out, they had letters, and these letters that came in from people against that article were just scathing. They said, you know, what is this, Time magazine is going back to some Puritanical view of sex, and all this, and I mean, the article in Time was pretty objective, and just the guilt that had built up to people to this. They just couldn’t accept the truth. To them, that was like Dr. Rushdoony was saying, was anti-freedom.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Yes? You had a question.

[Audience] Yes. I just recently heard on the radio from a doctor, was saying that any mother that did have herpes, and was pregnant, to make sure that the baby’s prevented from catching it. When it’s born, they have to give it a Caesarian birth. That’s the only way they can do it to make sure the baby will be alright.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience] And they are only limited to two children.

[Rushdoony] Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Audience] Just something that, I question how those who are, let’s say in positions of statist power could, how they can believe that what is legal and what the state declares is therefore moral, because in our society, I’m sure that there are laws that the state sanctions as legal, that some of these statist people would not agree with, and yet, don’t they end up in kind of a schizophrenic mentality here, because if they’re going to assert that the state is god. Therefore, what’s legal is moral, what about the laws that they don’t like?

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, they believe those laws that they don’t like represent relics of Christianity, and therefore, it is a part of the anti-freedom impulse of the past. Yes, John?

[Audience] Just one thing. I think part of the problem though, is also epistemological blindness in these people. Their basic starting point, foundation is corrupt, that they don’t see the alternative as being viable, and they’re therefore driven to the conclusion that the state is the only possible answer, and then self-justification sets in as the state seeks to redeem mankind, etc. on its own terms, and I think that’s the whole problem, and then they don’t have any qualms, you see, about switching sides in the middle of the stream. None whatever. I was talking earlier to Rush about this phone call I had at R.E. McMasters{?} today, and I’ve been trying to tell people for a long time with respect to television that ratings have nothing to do with whether a show stays on the air or not, and everyone seems to think that I’m giving them some kind of false data, but because so much is made of the ratings, but we can cite dozens of television shows that were pulled off the air at the very height of their ratings, and the reason why is because they did not conform the television, the content of the show didn’t conform to the basic philosophy that the media powers thought was proper.

An example, the Loretta Young Show that was at the height of its ratings when it was pulled off their air, and it was pulled off the air because it was too traditional and too Roman Catholic. R.E. McMasters{?} was telling me that he was on the Tom Schneider show, and the show that he did had some of the highest ratings in the history of late night television. He personally got 3,000 letters of response. The show was, the television lines was tied up for days afterwards, and yet, he was never allowed to come back on the show, you see. Now there’s an example of a show with massive ratings, you see, which and the networks made much money off that show. Massive ratings doesn’t necessarily mean that R.E. or anyone like him is going to get back on that show again, and I can give you plenty of illustrations of that kind. They can flip-flop in whatever way is necessary, and they feel perfectly justified in doing so, because most of them can only maybe sense the consequence of their idea. They don’t perceive the truth. They’re blind to it.

[Audience] Isn’t it true that because, actually the natural man cannot understand or see spiritual things, so when they think about religion as a whole, Christianity is one of many religions. So, religion is an opiate of the people. In other words, it’s a figment of the imagination more than anything else, or something to believe, so therefore, they class them all the same and then, because they believe the state, that they’re going to give equal rights to everybody. So everyone can think the way they want to, so you should not infringe on somebody else’s rights. So therefore, that is truth and the other is like Santa Claus or something.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Any other comments? Yes, Lou?

[Audience] Yes, some mention was made earlier about schizophrenia, and I think that’s more common than maybe we realize. I was talking to some young men earlier this week who turned out were very astute student of philosophy. They weren’t Christians, and two of them, at least, claimed to be positivists, objectively, but subjectively they were, I’ve forgotten now what the term is, believing in the spiritual, what do you call it? Now realists, but idealists. So they were objectively positivists and subjectively realists, and they seemed to be proud of that, very at home with this dichotomy.

[Rushdoony] Well, it’s the breakdown of logic in the modern mind. People feel that they can hold contradictory ideas without any problem.

[Audience] Isn’t that the way much of Christian teaching is?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Illogical and contradictory, with humanism and the Bible readily intermingled.

[Audience] In the same sermon they contradict themselves and don’t realize it.

[Rushdoony] Right. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us bow our heads in prayer as we conclude.

Our Father, it has been good for us to be here. We thank thee that thou art he who dost enlighten us and provide a lamp for our feet. Now give one and all traveling mercies on their homeward way, a blessed night’s rest and joy in their labors on the morrow. We commit ourselves, our hopes, and our loved ones into thy loving and omnipotent hands. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape